Israt Moyeen Noumi, Tarannum Ahmed Nowshin, Md. Mehedi Hasan Nipu +3cs.CL cs.AI cs.CR cs.MA
Agentic security uses large-language-model (LLM) agents to plan, dispatch, and interpret security tools. As these systems move from demonstrations to deployed products, practitioners repeatedly encounter the same operational failures. We systematize these failures through a hands-on evaluation of ten widely used static, dynamic, cloud, orchestration, and AI red-teaming tools for unattended pipelines. We introduce a four-dimensional Integration Friction Index that separates one-time engineering cost from recurring organisational, legal, and maintenance cost. We then derive quantitative regularities that explain recurring failure modes. Modelling an agentic security system as stochastic LLM policies wrapped by a deterministic mediator, we show that long-lived sessions lose resident evidence with phase count, while short-lived sub-agents extend the usable horizon according to the compression ratio between raw evidence and its summary. We show that a two-stage verdict cascade multiplies scorer likelihood ratios, but provides little benefit when scorer errors correlate. We show that treating unevaluable outcomes as attack failures biases downstream measurements toward evasive and severe responses. We formulate planner-versus-worker model routing as a knapsack problem and derive a closed-form execution cap for heavy-tailed tools, eta* = alpha v/c. Finally, we show why scope and budget enforcement cannot be delegated to system prompts: prompts do not constrain what actually executes. Inspectra, our implemented platform, serves as a worked instantiation, with mechanisms labelled shipped, partial, or planned, including those that did not work.
Ignacio D. Lopez-Miguel, Andreas Happe, Jürgen Cito +3cs.SE cs.LG
Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly used for complex tasks such as software testing and cybersecurity assessment. While these agents demonstrate impressive capabilities, their behavior is difficult to understand, explain, and analyze. Existing evaluations focus mainly on task success and execution traces, offering limited insight into the strategies employed by the agent. We present ATLAS (Automata Learning for Agent Trajectory Analysis and Strategy Discovery), an approach for recovering interpretable behavioral models from agent trajectories. ATLAS combines trace abstraction with automata learning to infer finite-state models that capture observed agent-environment interaction strategies. These models provide human-interpretable insights and support automated analyses of recurring behaviors, decision points, successful task-completion paths, and failure loops. As a proof of concept, we apply ATLAS to trajectories generated by an LLM-based penetration-testing agent. The resulting models expose high-level behavioral strategies for exploiting vulnerable machines that are difficult to identify from raw execution traces alone. We discuss how learned behavioral models can support explainability, model-guided exploration, auditing, and analysis of agentic systems. We further demonstrate symbolic model-based knowledge transfer from powerful frontier models to compact language models. In addition, we show how model transformations can derive concise explanations of agent behavior in a penetration-testing case study comprising 12 vulnerable machines. ATLAS highlights a new opportunity for model-driven engineering: transforming agent trajectories into explicit behavioral models that enable systematic understanding and analysis of otherwise opaque AI agents.
Large language model (LLM) agents automate penetration testing through an observation-action loop, selecting actions based on observations returned by tools. This dependence allows defenders to inject deceptive observations that can mislead the agent's decision-making process. However, existing defenses rely heavily on static, isolated artifacts planted in the environment prior to an attack. Advanced agents can progressively recognize and bypass these artifacts, ultimately refocusing their exploitation attempts on the real target. To address this issue, we introduce AgentSnare, a trajectory-adaptive deception system that dynamically unfolds a decoy environment to continually steer the penetration agent away from the real target. Specifically, AgentSnare employs an artifact-construction policy model that constructs candidate artifacts conditioned on the agent's interaction history and decoy state. AgentSnare then validates these candidates and incrementally incorporates valid artifacts into a factually consistent decoy environment, thereby delaying the attack by absorbing its tool calls, diverting its post-entry trajectory within the decoy, and defusing it by inducing completion reports grounded in decoy evidence. Across 15 CVE-Bench web applications and three attacker models, AgentSnare absorbs 46.8% of the agent's tool calls in the decoy and retains 55.9% of post-entry actions there, while 90.0% of completion attempts are grounded in decoy evidence; across all 45 attacker-CVE pairs, no real target is successfully exploited at pass@3.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into software development workflows, yet their ability to autonomously generate secure authentication code remains uncertain. This paper evaluates the security architecture of authentication systems generated by five prominent AI coding assistants through a bi-modal assessment framework combining static code analysis and dynamic penetration testing, mapped to NIST SP 800-63B guidelines. The study examines model behavior across four prompting strategies Basic, Secure, NIST-Based, and Reprompting to reflect varying levels of developer guidance. Empirical results demonstrate that code generated from functional or generically secure prompts consistently omits critical protections, particularly concerning brute-force resistance, session management, and robust password handling. While providing explicit, single-shot NIST context significantly improves compliance, the findings reveal that this remains structurally inadequate. Instead, iterative Reprompting: forcing models into a contextual self-auditing loop is strictly required to achieve a comprehensive, defense-in-depth security architecture. Ultimately, this study proves that current AI coding assistants do not produce secure-by-default applications, dictating that enterprise deployments must transition from single-shot prompt engineering to continuous, standards-driven verification pipelines.
Recent autonomous penetration testing papers report high benchmark scores while adding multi-component security harnesses around frontier LLMs. Because these systems often change both architecture and backbone model, it is difficult to tell how much performance comes from the harness rather than from the underlying model. This paper presents a controlled study on the 104-task XBOW benchmark using default coding CLI agents as plain-agent baselines. We first run Codex, OpenCode, and Pi with the same GPT-5 model, budget, target interface, and scoring rule. This phase identifies the strongest same-model baseline and tests whether security-specific prompt variants improve its observed score. We then compare the default Codex scaffold with published MAPTA and PentestGPT V2 results under the closest available model matches. Finally, we repeat the plain-agent experiment with GPT-5.2 and GPT-5.5 to measure model scaling inside the same scaffold. The results show a mixed but practical picture. Specialised harnesses can add measurable benchmark lift and may improve cost efficiency, but plain coding agents already solve a large share of the benchmark; repeated plain-agent runs can match or exceed some published architecture scores in union coverage, and newer models substantially improve the same scaffold. Future evaluations should report model-matched plain-agent baselines before attributing benchmark gains to architecture design alone.
Internet of Things (IoT) systems are inherently vulnerable due to constrained hardware, outdated firmware, and insecure default configurations, creating a need for scalable and adaptive security testing approaches. While recent adoptions of Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated promise in penetration testing and Capture-the-Flag (CTF) environments, their application to IoT specific vulnerabilities remains unexplored. This paper presents an autonomous multi-agent framework, referred to as Vulnerability EXploitation using AI Agents (VEXAIoT), for vulnerability discovery and exploitation in IoT environments using LLM-based reasoning and offensive security tools. The framework combines a vulnerability detection agent and an attack execution agent to perform reconnaissance, plan attack sequences, and execute exploits against vulnerable IoT services. The system is evaluated in IoTGoat and Metasploitable environments across ten attack scenarios mapped to OWASP IoT vulnerabilities. Experimental results show attack success rate of up to 100% with low token overhead and average execution times under two minutes for most attacks. Across 260 attack executions, VEXAIoT achieves a 95.0% overall success rate, including 94.5% success in IoTGoat and 96.7% success in Metasploitable2. These results demonstrate the potential for LLM-driven agents to automate IoT vulnerability assessment and offensive security workflows in controlled environments
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for automated penetration testing, yet existing end-to-end black-box evaluations are highly susceptible to error cascading: failures in early reconnaissance can mask an agent's actual ability to exploit vulnerabilities. To more accurately characterize these capabilities, we propose a two-stage decoupled evaluation framework that separates exploit execution from reconnaissance. Using ground-truth injection and knowledge-driven ablation across 70 high-fidelity web vulnerability testbeds, our framework isolates exploitation performance from reconnaissance noise. We empirically evaluate five open-source penetration-testing agents, covering multiagent, monolithic, and graph-driven architectures, on a strictly aligned subset of 50 representative vulnerabilities. The results reveal a substantial capability gap. With accurate vulnerability context, agents achieve a functional success rate of up to 90.0%, whereas autonomous reconnaissance, measured by targeted vulnerability recall, plateaus at approximately 50.0%, primarily due to failures in parsing unstructured telemetry. Cross-architectural analysis further reveals distinct capability niches: multi-agent isolation is more effective for long-sequence interactions such as de-serialization, while monolithic and graph-driven designs perform better on short-chain injections and cross-session access-control vulnerabilities, respectively. This decoupled evaluation work provides a fine-grained benchmarking protocol and an empirical basis for designing next-generation automated offensive security agents.
Nowadays, the autonomous execution of cyberattacks capable of causing substantial real-world harm is widely regarded as one of the critical red lines that frontier AI systems must not cross. Within this broader red-line scenario, autonomous penetration represents a core enabling capability and subtask: the ability of LLM-powered AI systems to independently conduct adversarial operations against a target server without human intervention, identify and exploit vulnerabilities, and obtain unauthorized access or control. A growing body of work has sought to assess the autonomous penetration capabilities of AI systems. However, existing evaluations often employ opaque methodologies, rely on unrealistic or overly simplified penetration-testing scenarios, or provide LLMs with excessive prior knowledge and task-specific guidance, and cannot accurately capture the extent to which modern AI systems can autonomously perform this core capability within broader high-impact cyberattack scenarios. To address these limitations, we construct a new autonomous penetration evaluation framework consisting of two components: target servers and agent scaffolding. Specifically, on the target-server side, we design two levels of target environments based on the number of secure services without known vulnerabilities deployed alongside a vulnerable service: Tier~1 (one secure service) and Tier~2 (three secure services), resulting in a total of 300 target servers. Meanwhile, the agent scaffolding adopts a general-purpose agent architecture equipped with a set of general-purpose cybersecurity tools, without any target-specific prior knowledge. We evaluate 19 open-weight and proprietary LLMs, and find that current models achieve penetration success rates ranging from 10.7% to 69.3%. Moreover, we observe that autonomous penetration capability continues to improve alongside advances in overall model capability.
Cyber threats are rapidly increasing, expanding their impact from large-scale enterprises to government services and individual users, making robust security systems increasingly essential. However, a significant shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals exacerbates this challenge. While recent research has explored automating tasks such as penetration testing using LLM-based agents, existing frameworks often perform poorly due to limited capability in strategy formulation, domain-specific reasoning, and accurate action and tool selection. To overcome these limitations, we propose Pen-Strategist framework, consisting of a novel domain-specific reasoning model that derives pentesting strategies via logical reasoning and a classifier that converts the strategies into actionable steps. First, we construct a reasoning dataset containing logical explanations for both strategy derivation and step selection in pentesting scenarios. We then fine-tune a Qwen-3-14B model for strategy generation using reinforcement learning. Evaluation on the test split of the dataset demonstrates a 87% improvement in strategy derivation performance compared to the baseline. Furthermore, we integrate the fine-tuned Pen-Strategist model into existing automated pentesting frameworks, such as PentestGPT, and evaluate its performance on vulnerable machines, achieving a 47.5% improvement in subtask completion while surpassing the baseline GPT-5. Further experiments on the CTFKnow benchmark show an 18% performance gain over the base model. For step prediction, we train a semantic-based CNN classifier, which outperforms commercial LLMs by 28% and enhances execution stability. Finally, we conduct a user study to qualitatively assess the generated strategies, and Pen-Strategist demonstrates superior performance compared to the Claude-4.6-Sonnet.